Analytics are one item that every site owner should be looking into to find out where traffic is coming from and how users are interacting with the site. However, analytics can sometimes be to much to consume with to much information or a cluttered interface.
Fortunately there are many analytics packages available that make reading and understanding your site’s stats pretty simple. You shouldn’t need to be a geek to just pick out the basics.
Here are 5 analytics packages that are easy to understand and mostly free.
Clicky – Free to $20/month
Clicky
Great user interface with graphs, bar charts and color coded %s to make understanding the information quick and visual.
Clicky also integrates Twiter and FeedBurner stats to monitor the growth of those services.
Paid accounts get a few more features, but the free account is very nice.
WordPress Stats – Free
WordPress
WordPress only, this plugin integrates stats right into the dashboard of your blog. You get a quick and simple overview of what’s happening on your site, but not really any in-depth information.
W3Counter – Free to $10/month
W3Counter
I haven’t used this service personally, but it includes navigation tracking, city level visitor maps, and a nice, clean interface. I may have to try it out and see how well it works as it looks promising.
Mint – $30 per site.
Mint
Mint is one of my favorite stats packages due to it’s ability to add and remove modules based on what type of information you want to track. If you don’t care about user locations, you can disable them. Want to add download tracking? Install a Mint Pepper, aka plugin. Customize it how you want it.
The downside to Mint is that there is a bit more setup involved and you need to have resources available on your site.
BLVD Stats – Free to $?
BLVD
BLVD Stats has a simple interface with colored boxes and plenty of space between information. Great for quick overviews and data consumption. Downside is that it’s a bit slow a times. I don’t have a lot of experience with BLVD Stats, but I am trying it out for a few weeks.
One of the great things about analytics is that you can install more than one package on your site. BloggerDesign runs Google Analytics for in-depth information and have recently added Clicky to get a basic overview when we just want to know what’s happening.
There is no right or wrong program to use, it just depends on what you want to get out of a stats package. There are plenty of choices and I’m sure there is one that is right for you.
What do you use for analytics on your blog? Do you have more than one stats package running?
